Not a good night’s sleep for same reasons as yesterday but without the earthquake, Silence may be golden buts it’s difficult to sleep when you are used to air-con noise etc.
Vivien picked us up at 0800, god we hate these early mornings, and by car we drove to Santiago and en-route we were given info about the various places and where you can grow vineyards and where you cannot.
When Noel was last here on business, about seven years ago, they were planning a long tunnel under the river which runs through the centre of town, the alternative was a overpass which everybody objected to, and so they blocked up the river and diverted it, then dug up the base and constructed a tunnel and then finally covered it all over again and then allowed the river back on its original course. So now we drove in this tunnel for about three miles under the river and finally to surface near our Hotel.
We arrived at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, points from previous stays over the years have paid for this, and it’s a nice hotel if not a little old by modern day’s standards.
We have a club room on the 18th floor overlooking downtown Santiago and with the foothills of the Andes in the foreground.
We understood there is a shopping mall nearby and so we headed down there to take a look, boy what a mall this is, its huge with hundreds of shops and restaurants and so we had lunch in a popular café of pita bread with a grilled chicken filling and watched the pretty office girls walk by and listen to a small group singing songs whilst sitting in the sun at about 29 degrees centigrade, it can’t get much better than this.We returned to the hotel after finding out about the get on/off tour bus which does a two hour trip around the main sites and then settled by the super large pool for a couple of hours with the plan to go to Tony Roma’s ribs restaurant for dinner.
As we are in the Club rooms we are entitled to join the evening 5 till 8pm free snacks and drinks which we did and after a few Chardonnays and Jennifer some merlot and snacks of smoked salmon, sushi and Spanish ham we decided we would pig ourselves out here and forget the restaurant and have a night in the hotel room as this one is large, has a nice seating area and magnificent views.
So it was a book reading time for Jennifer whilst Noel worked on updating the Blog and photos.
Let’s hope we sleep well tonight.
